With authorities urging the community to steel itself for a heartbreaking week ahead, Los Angeles County saw nearly 1,400 new cases of novel coronavirus reported over the weekend — climbing to nearly 6,000 since the outbreak began — and more than 40 new deaths.

Despite the grim news — 5,940 cases so far and a total of 132 deaths — the county has just begun to see the worst of what the coronavirus is bound to unleash, according to public health officials.

On Sunday, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams called the accelerating sweep of COVID-19 the “Pearl Harbor moment” for this generation of Americans.

A total of 2,403 Americans died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. At more than 9,400 deaths nationally in the past month from COVID-19, that’s three times the number of people who perished on 9/11 and five times more than lost their lives as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

President Donald Trump on Saturday warned the country “this will be the toughest week, this week and next. There will be a lot of death.”

L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said last week Los Angeles was on the front side of a steepening curve that’s only bound to worsen before it gets better.

“These are times that we have never anticipated and really have never experienced,” Ferrer said on Wednesday. “We should be prepared for a dramatic increase always understanding that if we weren’t doing what we were doing now, that increase would be much steeper.”

The latest grim L.A. County figures arrived on Palm Sunday, as Christians throughout the region found creative ways to worship to begin Christianity’s holiest week. “Let us offer our sacrifices for our brothers and sisters who are suffering, for all those who are risking their lives to serve others in this terrible pandemic,” said Rev. José H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, during his Palm Sunday homily. The Mass was celebrated in an nearly empty house at the cavernous Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Downtown L.A., but it was livecast to Catholics all over the region.

As of Sunday, 1,257 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized at one time in the county, representing roughly 21% of positive cases. The total cases on Sunday did not include 15 additional cases reported the same day in Long Beach. Two of the deaths reported Sunday were announced in Pasadena on Friday. Both cities operate their health departments so reports are generally delayed about a day in the county’s daily count.

“Eleven of the people who died had underlying health conditions and 10 people were over the age of 65,” the county reported in a press release Sunday. “Two people who died were between the ages of 41 and 65 years old and one person was between the age of 18 and 40 years old.”

The region and the country braced for what Ferrer and others have foretold for weeks — a surge of patients that will test the health care system in ways few could have imagined before this pandemic erupted.

“If there are 1,000 people who are positive and they each are infecting other people, if we don’t contain that spread within a few weeks there could be a million people infected,” Ferrer said during her briefing on March 26.

Ferrer has said to be prepared for numbers to rise next week to as many as 1,000 new cases per day.

The increasing number of new cases are also a result of greater testing capacity, which this week officials said should increase to roughly 10,000 people per day.

Almost 31,000 people have now been tested.

This week, the county is expected to open several new mobile testing sites including at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital as well as in East Los Angeles and Santa Clarita.

In addition, the county is in discussions with AltaMed to bring several urgent care facilities into the testing network. At the county’s public-testing centers, people must meet criteria for a test and schedule an appointment after qualifying.

In other parts of the region, Orange County reported 834 cases and 14 deaths and Riverside County had 799 cases and 19 deaths, as of Sunday. San Bernardino County 372 cases and 13 deaths, as of Saturday.

Statewide, the number of confirmed cases climbed to 13,438 positive cases and 319 deaths as of Saturday, April 4. Nationally, 325,185 cases and more than 9,400 deaths have been reported. Globally, there have been at least 1.25 million cases and 68,148 deaths.

At least five people experiencing homelessness have contracted the coronavirus so far in L.A, and there were at least 321 cases at more than 67 institutional settings, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, shelters, treatment centers and jails, as of Friday. At skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, 11 residents have died so far, though the county has offered no details on where they were living.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city is 14 to 17 days behind what New York is experiencing and it could be several months before getting back to normal. But because Los Angeles put in place stay-at-home orders earlier than New York, Garcetti and others are hoping the region just might be able to “flatten the curve.”

“The more quickly people do things the shorter it will last, and the slower they will do things the longer it will last,” Garcetti said on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher during a teleconference interview that aired Friday, April 3. “We were also not as far into the infection as other parts of the country like on the East coast.”

Tensions were rising across the Southland over the weekend with nurses staging demonstrations at various sites demanding more personal protective equipment. A group of immigration and housing activists in Long Beach staged a “caravan protest” where a dozen cars drove through the city for two hours starting at 2 p.m. They were demanding rent forgiveness and an extension of an eviction moratorium, said Jordan Doering with DSA Long Beach

“We’re basically calling for a cancellation of rent,” Doering said. “That sounds big and scary but it’s actually really needed right now. The current moratorium says you can’t be evicted from now until May 31 and you don’t have to pay back rent until November. Even when this crisis abates, for working class people it will be bad for maybe years to come. We need something stronger.”

Earlier in the day, employees at a McDonald’s location on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles went on strike after a worker tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the labor union group “Fight for $15.”

The workers there say they have not been provided masks and gloves despite repeated requests. In addition to a two-week quarantine period with pay, the cooks and cashiers are demanding McDonald’s cover health care costs of any worker or immediate family member who gets sick from COVID-19.

McDonald’s on Sunday responded by saying as soon as they learned an employee tested positive, they closed the restaurant and sanitized it thoroughly. Any staff member who contacted the employee was instructed to self-quarantine for 14 days. McDonald’s said it would pay those employees during their time off. Additionally, the company said it made gloves available and conducted wellness checks on its employees before each shift.

“Our people are the heart and soul of the McDonald’s family. We are keeping this employee in our thoughts for a fast and full recovery,” Nicole Enearu, McDonald’s Owner/Operator said in a statement.

COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019, is a respiratory disease that causes fever, a cough and trouble breathing. While most people will develop mild symptoms, the disease can cause more severe symptoms — and, as the increasing death toll illustrates, prove fatal — especially among the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

CDC guidelines for healthcare facilities treating those with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 include isolating the patient in a single-person room, with a dedicated bathroom, with the door closed. Public officials also advice that everybody wear a face mask while in public places, but that should not take the place of physical distancing and social isolation.

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David Rosenfeld has been working as a professional journalist for nearly 20 years at newspapers, magazines and websites. He's covered murder trials, interviewed governors and presidential candidates and once did a flip in a biplane for a story assignment. Before joining The Daily Breeze in 2018 to cover El Segundo, Hawthorne and aerospace, he worked at The Beach Reporter in Redondo Beach. In his free time, David loves outdoor sports such as sailing, mountain biking and golfing.

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